The road to San Antonio is not wrought with Vega and Hernandez

Deputy Prime Minister Gaspar Vega may not have any control over family relations, but did he have any knowledge about the contract given to his nephew Imer Hernandez? Records show that Hernandez was given a contract to improve the dusty San Antonio Road in Orange Walk District. A paper trail has linked alleged payments close to two hundred thousand dollars to Imer Hernandez Development Company. But the road is still a dusty road. The Prime Minister indicated that the matter is being looked into; but that the contract to Hernandez had been cancelled. The P.M. says that the funds paid were instead for another project.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow

“Some contracts were signed for work on the San Antonio Road; those contracts we canceled. The Financial Secretary confirms that the money that had been allocated, his permission as sought for shifting of the funds instead to do work in the Ocho Benque Area, which you will be no doubt delighted to learn is in the constituency of the deputy Prime Minister. I don’t know that the FS knew which works were to replace the San Antonio works that had been contracted for, but he gave permission for the reallocation of the funds. Mister Graciano Medina, is it, the district engineer confirms that his file will contain a note showing that in fact the San Antonio contracts were canceled. And he is saying, Minister Boots Martinez, says he has some pen and ink, handwriting notes that would bear this out—that the monies were used to do these various works in the Ocho Benque Area. What remains a mystery is why payments were made that on the face of them, evidenced that these payments were being done in connection with contracts that had already canceled. I haven’t spoken to Mister Median directly, but the reports are that it was a frenzied time, everybody was under pressure and so that was a mistake. I can’t simply leave it there and so the Ministry of Finance is asking for all this to be documented in writing. The Ministry of Works and in particular that official must say this to us, put it on the record and then we go from there. But that is the position—it is still unsatisfactory, but certainly not as unsatisfactorily as it would have been if in fact there would have been no cancelation of the San Antonio Road contract and if in fact the story—quite properly on the basis of the then available facts—suggested that Imer Hernandez was paid for work on the San Antonio Road under a contract which he did not perform; which he did not execute.”

Dean Barrow

Jules Vasquez, Channel 7

“Shouldn’t we be concerned that Imer Hernandez, nephew of the Deputy Prime Minister, is being awarded contracts with some hazing of details in Orange Walk North?”

Prime Minister Dean Barrow

“Well I don’t know that he’s been awarded any contract since…or that he has done any work there since the series of works done at that time which was in 2012. I get the sense that Mister Hernandez—who from all reports is an excellent contractor—has moved on to far bigger things. I believe he has one a number of contracts funded by the international agencies, which you know those tenders are scrutinized very carefully. And so there has been no need. I did not at the time see any difficulty at all with Mister Hernandez’s Company being contracted to do the works, providing that we were going to get value for money. And I repeat, there was nothing that I had heard that suggested that Mister Hernandez had a track record to suggest that anything other than value for money would be what we would have obtained from him.”

The Prime Minister also discussed Noh Mul and we’ll have that later in the newscast.